Electronic printing devices have become an integral part of many business environments. Most businesses that use paper in their workflow tend to create documents using an electronic printer and these printers are frequently connected to a computer network. Electronic printers are becoming more widely used as the technology becomes generally accepted, but the use of these printers can add up to a significant cost for any business. Every printer purchased by a business will later need maintenance, repair and network support. In order to manage these costs, businesses often purchase several printers of a similar type. This allows them to decrease the time, cost, and complexity of maintenance and repairs.
Large and medium size businesses often have certain makes and/or models of printers that are selected to do the majority of their printing. The businesses usually have several printers of the certain model distributed around the business.
Employees are generally assigned to the printer near their work area in order to optimize the employee's productivity. When an employee prints a large volume of material, or complex print jobs containing extensive graphics, even high speed printers can become bogged down. Printing a single complex job can slow down or even stop the work of other employees in that area, because the remaining print jobs have to wait. Older printers with less memory and slower processors can amplify this problem, because slower printers may even become bogged down with medium size print jobs.
Print jobs with a large amount of graphics or images can especially slow down a printer. Printers usually have processors that receive print job information and convert the information into a form that allows the printer to correctly place the ink or toner on the printed page.
Many printers have been optimized to print text pages at high speed. Graphical images, however, contain a much larger amount of information that is usually processed by the printer processor before the information can be printed. A medium sized picture may contain several megabytes of data, requiring the printer processor to rasterize a large amount of information in order to generate the points of ink or toner for the output page. The processing of this graphics information can take printers more time than the actual printing, which can cause a significant delay between the printing of each page.
Businesses have attempted to overcome the problem of printer slowdown using several methods. One method can be to place more printers around the workplace. However, this strategy can be quite costly. The increased number of printers is usually needed when large print jobs or a large volume of jobs are sent to the printers. Each extra printer purchased by a business also needs maintenance, repair, and network support.
Another method to overcome printer slowdown can be to use software to send each separate page of complex print jobs to multiple printers. This solution can become quite labor intensive because it may require someone to go to each printer to pick up the pages and hand collate the print job. The printed pages can easily become lost in the process, which wastes more time and money when the print job has to be repeated. Since the printers are often distributed around the workplace, locating the dispersed print job requires significant effort and reduces productivity.